A Study Of Strategies In Dealing With Cultural Factors In English-chinese Movie Subtitle Translation

With the acceleration of globalization, international communications and cross-cultural exchanges have grown rapidly. Along with imported books, foreign films are drawing increasing attention from Chinese viewers. So film translation, especially film subtitle translation, has become not only a very important activity of cultural exchanges but also a hot research topic.Motion picture subtitle translation involves the transfer of meaning not only on the linguistic level, but also on the cultural level. According to Eugene Nida, it is especially important to cope with the cultural factors in subtitle translation, In the handling of cultural information, there are generally two translation approaches:one is domestication, which is target-culture oriented, and the other is foreignization, which is source-culture oriented. It is now necessary to find a new way of defining the relationship between the two opposite orientations in the translation of film subtitles, a form of presentation constrained by time and space.This research project is a study of two Chinese-subtitled versions of Forrest Gump to demonstrate that domestication and foreignization are equally valid approaches in movie subtitle translation. A sensible translator should be eclectic by altering between the two according to the contexts and receptor needs. Moreover, the study also indicates that certain specific translation strategies such as omission, expansion, substitution, explication and sound pattern parallels help domesticate the target texts whereas lexical parallels and syntactic parallels foreignizes the target texts. Nevertheless, all of them are effective means to remove cultural barriers for the target viewers.As for direction of future research in this area, the thesis suggests coverage of a much larger quantity of data and consideration of the heterogeneity of target viewers’command of the source culture.